Monitoring cameras are used in many different applications, both indoors and outdoors. The video captured by such cameras is often sent to a video management system, VMS, which may apply various video analytics procedures to the video, such as motion detection and object detection or recognition, where the objects e.g. could be faces or license plates. The outcome of the analytics procedures may be logged as events which in turn may trigger alarms or is collected into different statistics, such as for the purpose of people counting or vehicle counting. The VMS may also be arranged to start a recording of the video if certain events take place. In some cases the monitoring cameras themselves may also have the capacity to analyze the captured video and locally perform various video analytics procedures.
There also exist different types of motion sensors, such as passive infrared, PIR, sensors, which sense changes in heat radiation. Both video analytics procedures performed on video from a monitoring camera and motion detection by motion sensors may sometimes trigger on uninteresting objects or motions in a monitored scene. Different efforts exist to combine the output from cameras and other types of sensors. As one example a PIR sensor may be connected to the I/O port of a monitoring camera, and when the PIR sensor is triggered, the camera is set to start recording. Other ideas on how to combine outputs from a camera with other sensors also exist, but there is still room for improvement in this area.